As I kept reading reviews of the Coen Brothers’ latest, A Serious Man, I noticed many critics comparing it to the book of Job, going so far as to call it an adaptation, or modern-day retelling.  Having a natural interest in the Coen Brothers’ style, if not always their content, I now had an additional reason to rent the movie: To prepare for a rebuttal of the critics’ claims.

Basically, calling A Serious Man an adaptation of the book of Job is like calling Free Willy an adaptation of Moby Dick.  Apart from a couple of superficial structural similarities, A Serious Man plays like the Coens read verses 13 through 19 of Job Chapter One, then closed the book and invented the rest.

It is the story of Larry Gopnick, a Jew in a nameless midwest community in the 1960’s.  He teaches physics, has a wife and kids, and everything seems to be okay - until his wife asks for a divorce, a student tries to both bribe and blackmail him for a better grade, his tenure is threatened by an anonymous writer sending defaming letters to the tenure board, and his television won’t get reception so his son can watch “F-Troop”.

In all this, of course, we are meant to see the similarity in the way catastrophe struck Job.  What is lacking is any real sense of catastrophe, however.  Job lost his children and all his wealth, which was considerable.  Larry stands merely to lose a happy and comfortable way of life.

Larry spends the movie trying to visit with three prominent rabbis in his community, in a parallel to the three friends who visited Job.  In both stories, the advice ends up being unusable: In Job’s case, because the advice was wrong, lacking insight into God’s workings; in Larry’s case, because the advice is vague parables that would indicate the rabbis themselves don’t really know how to answer Larry’s questions and are being verbose so that they don’t have to be right.

After that, the stories part ways.  Missing from A Serious Man is any insight into the heavenly dialogue between God and Satan that leads to Job’s earthly woes.  Missing is a clear picture of Job’s upright character before the Lord - Larry is a good man, but his life lacks that obvious commendation from God given to Job in the very first verse.  And - being vague to avoid spoiling the movie - by the time the movie is over, it could not be said of Larry that “in all this, he sinned not.”

The movie itself is told with the usual Coen excellence and irresistable quirkiness, and I expect to have a more “secular” evaluation of it as an artistic work on my personal blog soon.  It is one of their more odd efforts, to be sure, with an ending so enigmatic it puts anything directed by Robert Redford to shame.  But the characters and delivery are their usual unique product.

And to be fair, I have yet to hear the Coens themselves claim it is an adaptation of Job.  I’ve only heard critics draw the comparison.  Either way, anyone who sees Job’s story in this film doesn’t really know the message of Job’s life, nor his happy ending for his faithfulness.  Overall, for language, and moments of sex and violence, plus a vague ending and potentially sacreligious abuse of Scripture, I don’t recommend A Serious Man.

An Exploration of Genesis, #8 - In His Own Image

Genesis 1:26-27 – [26] And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

[27] So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

On Day Six, God reaches the grand centerpiece of His work of Creation: Man. He formed the planet for Man to live on, and filled the planet with animals for Man’s enjoyment (though not for food, as we see toward the end of chapter one); and now that all is prepared, God brings Man into existence.

What does it mean to be made “in the image of God”? God is spirit (John 4:24), so it cannot mean that we look like Him; as an omnipresent spirit being, God simply does not have two arms, two legs, a torso, and so on.

Some have suggested that to be made in His image is to be a triune being like He is. As He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three distinct persons in one entity, so we are body, soul, and spirit, three distinct elements that constitute one person. The problem I have with this is that the body dies and the soul and spirit leave it. Multitudes of souls even now are in the Lord’s presence, having left their old bodies and awaiting their new ones, and have been that way for centuries or even millennia. By this explanation, they are missing a part of themselves and are not at all “in his image.” There is also debate on whether the soul and the spirit are actually two distinct parts of a person, or if that phrase is used in Hebrews 4:12 as hyperbole to indicate just how effective the Word of God is.

The best answer is that being made in His image refers to our bearing of God’s communicable attributes, such as His mind, intellect, ability to think and reason. Man also, in the beginning, bore His moral attributes and were sinless. This explanation is also consistent with the idea of our being conformed more and more to the likeness of Christ (Romans 8:29) and the urging not to conform to the world (Romans 12:2). Neither of these is referring to any physical transformation, but to our morals, ethics, and thought patterns: To conform to the image of Christ is to line one’s spiritual life up with His.

The first man and woman, then, bore this “image” of God. Unlike all the previously created creatures, mankind was given the ability to think and reason according to moral code. Animals behave only by instinct and give no thought to right or wrong. Lions do not debate the ethics of killing gazelles; spiders care not for whether they have invasively built their webs on private property; my cat feels nothing for the damage he does by marking his territory inside our house.

But regarding mankind it is specifically noted that God created them in His image. Man alone has the mental capacity to live by God’s moral code and to be accountable for his actions.

In creating Man, God gave him the charge to have dominion over all other creatures on earth. Once again, animals did not yet serve as food; but certainly some of them could legitimately be used as beasts of burden or transportation. Perhaps they also needed taming. The precise details of what it meant to have dominion over a perfect environment are not present, but we do know that God bestowed on Man the highest position in His earthly hierarchy, thus setting him apart from the animal kingdom. Man served as God’s representative in charge of life on earth.

Despite the hue and cry of radical feminists in the twentieth century, the terms “Man” and “mankind” are not inherently chauvinist. From the beginning, God created the species of Man as male and female. Both are fully human, members of one race. God created them from the beginning to work together, to form one unit between them. But we will look deeper at this in chapter two.

Why did God even create them as male and female? Why not one asexual life form called Man that reproduces like an amoeba, with the descendent splitting off from the parent’s body?

As mentioned in earlier devotionals, I believe the material universe is a physical and visible expression of spiritual truths. God created our world to function as an illustration of the world we cannot yet see. On this presupposition, then, my guess regarding God’s particular design for Man helps illustrate His own relationship with us. Indeed, the Bible is stocked with references to God’s people being His “bride,” that He loves us like a husband loves a wife, and so on.

Rather than make us independent agents of self-sufficiency and reproduction, God created male and female to work together as a unit. There is no producing offspring unless a male and a female are involved, even in today’s perverse world where the male and female never meet because the male left his seed at the sperm bank and the female bought the seed and got impregnated by someone not her husband.

Back when bridges were often constructed out of stone, the builders finished the bridge with a keystone, a rock placed in the center of the bridge’s arch. Because of its shape and placement, the keystone actually held the whole bridge together. Remove the keystone, and the forces holding the other rocks in place were removed and the bridge would collapse.

Mankind is Creation’s keystone. Man is the reason God created a planet, a sun, water, plant life, and animal life. This moment is the culmination of God’s entire Creation project. This thought should not bloat our sense of pride, but rather make us rejoice and be thankful to the God who made us.

An Exploration of Genesis, #7 - Life on Earth

Genesis 1:20-25 – [20] And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

[21] And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

[22] And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.

[23] And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

[24] And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

[25] And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

I have grouped Day Five with the first part of Day Six because they are similar events.  Over this period of time, God creates all the animals on the planet, once again adhering to the orderly fashion He set up.

Just as the second day of “forming” concerned creating the air and the sea, so the second day of “filling” (Day Five) is concerned with the air and the sea.  On this day, God speaks into existence all the sea animals and all the birds of the air.  He fills the sky and the ocean “abundantly” with life, so that from the very beginning untold numbers of an amazing variety of animals occupied these places

On Day Six, God does the same with the land-based creatures.  Just as the third day of “forming” was involved with the dry land, so is the third day of “filling.”  God calls into existence all the cattle, creeping thing, and beasts.  While I’m sure there is a technical distinction in these three words in the original Hebrew, the point ultimately is that everything considered a land animal was created at this time.

As I noted on Day Three regarding plants, God also calls the animals to reproduce after their own kind.  Whales give birth to whales, eagles give birth to eagles, and dogs give birth to dogs.  This does not obstruct the known fact of genetic mutations within a species, but it does rebuke the idea that, given enough time, a fish would have a lizard as one of its distant descendants.

In the case of dogs, for example, breeding practices have isolated specific genes to manufacture everything from St. Bernards to teacup poodles, and often the breeds are at such extremes that two animals both identified as dogs have been unable to breed with each other.  This has often been handed to me as evidence of evolution, but notice that all the dogs in question are still dogs.  Micro-evolution is simply genetic mutation within a species, to which Creationists have no objection.  It is observable scientific fact.  But what evolutionists are blind to is that no amount of breeding techniques will ever take the line of dogs across the gap to become cats.  Genetic mutation will never bridge the chasm between species, making macro-evolution impossible.

In fact, the closer breeds get to the edge of their species, the weaker they become, the more deformed; and the faster they die.  Genetic mutations are almost always detrimental to some degree, and become increasingly debilitating the further away from the median “kind” they stray.  It borders on insanity to claim otherwise.

But it doesn’t take powerful microscopes and computers probing the very genetic material of life to see that evolution is utterly ridiculous.  Simply take a look at the animal kingdom, which is replete with marvelous mechanisms that could never in a billion years form themselves through random mutation.

Consider the giraffe.  Evolutionists have argued that its long neck is the result of those with shorter necks dying out when food supplies at the ground level became scarce.  But there’s a problem here, and it is with the fact that when a baby giraffe is born, it can only be described as small and close to the ground.  If the food supply at a lower level were so scarce as to eliminate those giraffes with necks so short they couldn’t reach the higher food up in the trees, then that would also eliminate any and all baby giraffes, period, leaving us with no giraffes at all.

But that’s actually not why I bring up the giraffe.  With its long neck, the giraffe actually has another issue that would be fatal in any offspring that were not perfectly created by God.  When the giraffe bends over to eat food, much of it very low to the ground, the blood rushes from the base of its neck to its head.  Were it not for a special muscle that closes off key blood vessels every time the giraffe does this action, the amount of blood reaching its head would kill it.  The presence of this life-saving muscle is no mindless product of mutation.

Consider the spider.  A typical garden spider has an abdomen that generates a silky web material, and the spider has a God-given instinct to use its back legs to extract that material in strands that it lays out in a spiral pattern.  In addition, spiders spin two kinds of strands, one sticky and the other not.  Unlike flies and other food sources, the spider does not get stuck because it instinctively walks along only the non-stick strands.  It has venom for paralyzing its meal, which it had the instinct to wrap up and preserve for later.  Consider for a moment what a mess a spider would be in if any one part of this process were somewhere short of functioning perfectly, sometime millions of years ago when it was still developing.  Without the web-walking instinct, it would get caught in its own web and die.  Without the web-spinning ability, it wouldn’t be able to catch food and it would die.  Without the venom, it wouldn’t be able to keep its food from struggling back to freedom, and it would die.  Short of being created by God ready to function fully, the spider would never have made it to the present day.

Consider the bee.  Such a common insect, but look at its life and functions.  A worker bee has the instinct to look for food sources in flowers.  Once it finds a new supply, it returns to the hive where it does a movement specifically designed to communicate to the other bees the direction and distance from the hive that they must fly.  And they fly there using wings that have defied science for decades.  According to everything we know about physics, the common bee shouldn’t even be able to get off the ground because of its weight, wingspan, and movement of the wings.  And we haven’t even looked at the hive itself, where bees just “happen” to create one of the strongest architectural structures known to man: Tessellating hexagons.

Consider the glaucus.  Never heard of it?  Most people haven’t.  It is somewhat fish-like in shape, but with pudgy-looking limbs like an overweight lizard.  It swims in tropical waters, especially those known to cater to the Portuguese Man o’ War.

The Man o’ War itself is a wonder, made up of four separate organisms, none of which can survive on its own so they bond and work together as a siphonophore.  The tentacles of a Man o’ War are powerful, paralyzing fish that make contact.  On humans, the sting is painful, and can leave welts; some people have an allergic reaction, and rare cases of death have been reported.

Though it takes only a gentle brush against the tentacles to set them off, the glaucus can swim up to a Man o’ War and bite a tentacle off with such skill and delicacy that the sting is not activated.  The glaucus then swallows the tentacle, and maneuvers the stingers into the tips of its limbs internally – all without setting off any reaction.  The glaucus is now armed: If a predator brushes against the glaucus, the pressure will fire the stingers which will push through the glaucus’s porous skin and sting the predator.  In all of this, the glaucus is not harmed.  Work that one out by evolution.  More importantly, show me your fossil evidence, because simply imagining what might have happened is not the same as producing the proof.

The earth is a vast catalogue of life forms that daily make a mockery of mankind’s absurd attempts to remove God from the universe.  He has filled the planet with such boundless creativity, and put in place such astounding biological mechanisms, that to deny His act of Creation is sheer folly.  Perhaps that is the reason He made such complex and interesting creatures, so that no man is without excuse when the Day of Judgment comes.

An Exploration of Genesis, #6 - Twinkle, Twinkle

Genesis 1:14-19 – [14] And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

[15] And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

[16] And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

[17] And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,

[18] And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

[19] And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Day Four begins the second half of Creation.  First God spent three days forming what was formless; now He will fill what was empty.  And He will do so in an orderly parallel: The first day of “forming” involved light and darkness; so the first day of “filling” will also involve light and darkness.

I want to start at verse sixteen.  In creating the sun and the moon, God takes the light that was generated from an undefined source for the first three days and gives it a specific source in the Sun.  He then creates the moon to be a “lesser light” for the night.  These two spheres become the “rulers” of the day and the night, marking a clear distinction between darkness and light.

Some critics want to point out the fact that the moon does not actually generate its own light, and thus they claim the Bible is a purveyor of myth instead of science.  And yet even today our enlightened culture uses the word “moonlight” in referring to the glow bouncing off the moon, so the issue is that of the critics’ vain attempts to find an error rather than of the Bible’s inaccuracy.

Throughout the Bible, in speaking to finite minds, God often uses mankind’s reference point instead of precise scientific language.  Some verses mention the sun rising, for instance.  I came across a website once that listed this as yet another reason not to believe the Bible.  I laughed.

We are well aware that the earth is doing the rotating; the sun itself is not actually rising or setting.  But even today’s meteorologists calculate the time of “sunrise” because that is our perspective.  So either the Bible’s critics must denounce everyone who speaks of moonlight and sunrises as ignorant myth-mongers, or they need to admit the argument’s weakness and sit down.

God’s purpose in creating the sun, moon, and stars is laid out in verses fourteen and fifteen.  They are to create light upon the earth, for one.  The relative brilliance of the various lights also generates a period of day and a period of night as the earth spins.  Out of this, then, we gain the ability to calculate the passage of days, weeks, months, and years.

Verse fourteen also mentions that the heavenly bodies are for “signs and seasons.”  At the risk of reading too much into something simple, I will present some of the thoughts that cross my mind the more I think about this.  The next few paragraphs are educated guesses based on Scripture, not actual doctrine drawn from the verses.

Note that God planned the presence of seasons.  It is well and good to have the sun defining each individual day, but even from the beginning God had in mind a world that had a planting season and a harvest season.  If the hypothesis of a worldwide vapor canopy creating a tropical atmosphere is correct, then the planet would not experience the definite extremes of Summer and Winter that we feel today; but there was still a time that was good to plant, and therefore a time when it was good to harvest the crop.

But if the four seasons we know today were not clearly delineated in a tropical paradise that was always warm and lush, how did God intend His creation to know when those seasons were?  This, I believe, is the main purpose of the stars.  Seasons in paradise were not identified by temperature, but by the location of constellations in the sky.  The position of major stars would indicate that it was time to plant and time to harvest.

This is not entirely unheard of even today.  The locations of constellations and specific stars in the sky have long been used as one indicator for calculating the timing of events.  Those people groups with a long history of agrarian culture have many ways of using the natural world to calculate seasons and predict weather, and their expertise at reading the natural signs often puts modern meteorologists to shame.

Ultimately, the Bible makes no indication about what is meant by “signs” here.  Given that astrology is forbidden in other verses, it definitely does not mean we are to “read” the stars in an attempt to discern our future or how we should act on any given day.  The idea that Venus or Jupiter or any other chunk of rock or fiery ball of gas whizzing through space light years away from us has any impact on our spiritual or emotional existence is such obvious lunacy it can only be Satanic delusion.

The signs verse fourteen speaks of may be nothing more than the seasonal indicators we’ve already looked at.  Apart from the star that indicated the presence of the infant Jesus, I know of no other miraculous signs that stars have been used for in the Bible.  Readers are welcome to point me to any such Scriptural events I may have missed.

All theorizing about vapor canopies and astronomical signs aside, what we do know for certain is that God made the sun, the moon, and all the heavenly bodies for the reasons stated in these verses.  Every time you see a sunrise, or happen to catch a view of the moon, remember that God put it all in motion for a purpose that He is fulfilling even today.

An Exploration of Genesis, #5 - Sighting Land

Genesis 1:9-13 – [9] And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

[10] And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

[11] And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

[12] And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

[13] And the evening and the morning were the third day.

On the third day of the Creation project, God causes land to arise out of the mighty ocean that covered the entire planet’s surface.  The grammar used in verses nine and ten suggests to me that solid rock made up the core of the planet already, possibly from the moment the raw materials were brought into existence in verse two.  God therefore made the bedrock shift so that it peaked up out of the ocean and the waters ran off it.

It is also likely that this was one solid continent of land, not the seven we name today.  There is nothing anti-Biblical about the geological hypothesis called Pangea, the idea that all the land we know today was once a single mass that broke up and shifted.  The only flaw in the hypothesis is the belief that it took millions of years of sluggish plate tectonics to cause, for instance, South America to break away from Africa and drift to its present location.

Once the seas had subsided and dry land was present on the planet surface, God spoke plant life into existence.  Grasses, herbs, and trees were all planted by God’s voice.

A simple truth quietly presents itself here that flatly denies evolution, and it will occur again a few verses later.  It is the truth that things reproduce after their own kind.  A fern produces a fern, an apple tree produces an apple tree.  These are not “higher” life forms that were once something smaller and less complex that eventually became ferns and apple trees because of random genetic mutations.  Creationists do not deny genetic mutation, but we do deny that those mutations will ever, even in minute increments, cause an apple tree to eventually bear some other kind of fruit.  Life forms reproduce after their own kind, which is what we see happening on a daily basis with no scientific evidence to the contrary.

Even before we reach a discussion on animals, the world of plant life alone has such variety and complexity that evolution becomes an obvious fraud.  From the beauty of a lily to the painful needles of a cactus, these plants simply did not invent themselves over millions of years.

Plants are complex mechanisms, and either all their parts work in harmony or the plant dies before it can even attempt to reproduce.  The plant “knows” that its roots must grow down while its stalk pushes upward through the dirt to find the sunlight.  Flowers bend with the course of the sun, and then fold up at night.  Photosynthesis provides nutrition.  Trees “just happen” to lose their leaves in the fall by corking up the stem of each leaf to prevent internal damage during the winter.  And the list could go on.

My favorite plants, especially when debunking evolution, are the predatory ones.  Consider the pitcher plant, which grows a bulbous sac that fills with a digestive fluid.  It secretes an aroma that attracts insects to its opening, and inside the opening are hairs that point down into the pool of fluid.  When an insect crawls too far, it slides off the hairs and into the fluid which proceeds to digest it while it struggles futilely to get a grip on the hairs.  The nutrition from the insect is absorbed into the pitcher plant’s system, thus sustaining it.  If any aspect of this were dysfunctional, the plant would never capture the insects needed for life.

Even simpler, yet still amazing, is the Venus fly trap.  My apologies, but you simply cannot convince me that over millions of years, minuscule genetic mutations led to a plant that grows hinged buds with interlocking tines and a sensitive pressure pad inside that reacts to the landing of a fly and causes the bud to close upon the fly, after which the fly is digested and its nutrition assimilated into the plant.

A study of the planet’s flora so clearly reveals a Creator that it can only be a willful desire to expel God from one’s life which leads to belief in evolution.  The evidence is abundant that these life forms did not and could never have evolved.

The acts of Day Three bring to a close the first half of Creation.  Though I was familiar with this chapter at a very early age, it wasn’t until I attended college that a professor pointed out that God did not just happen to lay out the planet in six days, nor did He begin each day by deciding on a whim what He would do next.  There is a definite order and purpose here.

Notice that the earth was described in the beginning as being both formless and empty (v. 2).  God took the first three days of Creation to give the earth its form, with its night and day, atmosphere and clouds, dry land and seas.  As we proceed with the next three days, we will see Him then fill the emptiness of the earth in a parallel process.  At the end we will step back and see a spiritual picture God is presenting in all of this.

An Exploration of Genesis, #4 - The Cloud Bank

Genesis 1:6-8 – [6] And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

[8] And God called the firmament Heaven.  And the evening and the morning were the second day.

As the second rotation of the planet begins, we learn a little more about exactly what it was that God laid out in space to work with.  In verses six and seven, God decrees a “firmament,” or more simply an “expanse” in the middle of the waters, with some water above, and some water below.  Even in modern English, exactly what is happening here can be confusing from the wording.

The fact that these “waters” are divisible into an upper and lower layer suggests that the “waters” of verse two are not so much a liquid ocean, but rather a very thick cloud over the entire surface.  Picture an intense fog everywhere, so dense and so deep that when God commands a layer of clear air to appear and separate the fog, the water vapor below is enough to condense to form all the oceans we know today.  This is an educated guess, since God did not choose to fill out the details; but it fits with what information we do have without conflicting with any other verses.

Now the planet is covered with a massive ocean, then on top of that the atmosphere we exist in today.  But the waters were divided, so not all of the vapor became the ocean.  Once again we have to hypothesize from what we do know.

Perhaps the other half of the water vapor stayed above to function like the frosted glass of a greenhouse.  The picture we get from various events in Genesis and from archeology is that the earth did once have a misty canopy over its entire surface.  This would cause the whole planet to have a generally tropical feel, even at the northern and southern extremes.

We will eventually meet Adam and Eve, who spent their first days entirely naked without being too cold and without being sunburned, suggesting the planet surface was a perfect temperature at all times and in all places.  And the planet Venus demonstrates this possibility, though its placement closer to the sun causes the cloud layer to trap so much heat it is rather more like a boiling sauna than the tropics.

The expanse or firmament, then, in between the surface oceans and the atmospheric cloud bank is nothing more than that layer of the atmosphere where life was to dwell.  Verse eight names this space Heaven, so it is possible the cloud canopy was much higher up than the typical clouds we see floating around today.  Or our definition of “the heavens” changed once that canopy disintegrated.

To repeat, even when all the evidence of the first few chapters of Genesis is put together, the best we have is a hypothesis.  None of us will ever know for sure exactly what the planet surface looked like when Adam and Eve first opened their eyes.  But the suggestion of a cloud canopy functioning as a greenhouse roof to turn the whole planet into a tropical zone is certainly not beyond the evidence; it is in fact the best possible scenario given everything we do know about the creation of the world.

While I found no specific deep and impacting application to apply to my heart in these verses, at the very least we do see God’s loving hand in preparing a place for His people to live.  A breathable atmosphere, kept warm and lush and inviting, awaits the first two human beings who will arrive four days from now.  Similarly, He is even now preparing a place for all who have surrendered to His sovereignty.

An Exploration of Genesis, #3 - Let There Be Light

Genesis 1:3-5 – [3] And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

[5] And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.  And the evening and the morning were the first day.

The first act of Creation was to create light.  God spoke, and light came into existence.  With an all-powerful God, it’s just that simple.

Amazingly, there are critics of the literal interpretation of Creation who point to this passage as a stumbling block for us literalists.  They ask, usually in a smug tone that suggests this question devastates the literal view: “Where did the light come from, since there was no sun?”  And some of them, like Rob Bell, are people who do claim to believe in an omnipotent God.

The answer is simple: I don’t know.  But having no solid answer is no hindrance to believing it is true nevertheless.  God created light without a defined source.  As an all-powerful God, He can do that kind of thing.  The light may have even radiated directly from Himself, as it will do when He brings the new Heaven and the new Earth into existence at the end of history.

Verse three also falls prey to the Word-Faith movement.  Some popular televangelists have claimed that this verse demonstrates the power of words: Just as God spoke and Creation happened, we too can simply speak and things will happen or come into existence.

The faultiness of this is so obvious it’s painful to think anyone still listens to these particular “preachers.”  The fact is not that there is power in words, but that there is power in God.  God was the one doing the speaking, and thus there was light.  No other being in the universe has that power, because no other being in the universe is God.

Wherever the light did come from, God assigned it a place to radiate out from, as it shined only on one side of the planet.  Thus He separated light from darkness, calling the bright side of the planet Day and the dark side Night.  The planet was apparently already rotating at something close to its present speed, because it experienced an evening and a morning just as we do today.

And here, too, we face yet another faulty attempt to make the Bible more “compatible” with evolution.  Compromising and liberal Christians have pointed out that the word at the end of this verse is a Hebrew word that can mean three things: A standard calendar day, an era as in “America has seen its day,” or a totally undefined period of time.

So then, in an attempt to explain rocks that read as millions of years old, some have suggested that each “day” of Creation actually lasted for a vast and undefined amount of time.  Therefore the six “days” in total could have lasted millions of years, they say.

But this is also easily proven false.  In the rules of Hebrew syntax, when “morning and evening” and a specific number accompany the word “day,” the only possible understanding is that of a standard 24-hour period.  Without exception, “the evening and the morning were the first day” can only mean a day, a single full rotation of the planet.  Mankind is welcome to discount the verse entirely (to their peril), but there is only one possible meaning when the rules of Hebrew are applied.  We will see the spiritual importance of this physical reality later in Genesis and again in Exodus.

A few years ago I came to the solid belief that everything God does in the physical universe is designed to reflect a spiritual truth.  The planet and the things that happen upon it give our finite minds a look into some aspect of spiritual reality that we could not otherwise grasp.  Despite having read this chapter a hundred times in my life, the thing that came to my attention for the first time while writing this devotional is the fact that God pronounces only the light to be “good.”  He does not say the same thing for the darkness.

This historical event and physical reality reflect a spiritual truth for us to notice.  We begin life stumbling around in the dark, spiritually.  We cannot find our way, we grasp for anything that gives us stability.  We are “void” spiritually.

Look at the world around us and how people are constantly grasping in this way.  Numerous religions and offshoots, yoga, psychotherapy, money, material goods; really, the list is endless.  Man wants certainty, stability, and fulfillment; and the rapid way in which our world moves from fad to fad seeking satisfaction should be a testimony to the emptiness (and danger) of groping in the dark for what we seek.

By contrast, God shines a light into that darkness, and those who are willing to turn to it will find that it is good, that walking by the light of God’s truth is a joy and comfort.  Once accepted, God’s light gives stability, comfort, and certainty.  It gives us direction on a daily basis and a long-term vision of our final destiny in eternity.

The Light is good indeed.

An Exploration of Genesis, #2 - Raw Materials

Genesis 1:2 – And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Elohim begins His act of Creation by laying out the raw materials.  The matter that would eventually become Earth was generated out of nothing, in miraculous violation of the fact that matter can neither be created nor destroyed.

At the very first, almost like a glob of clay the potter has slapped onto the worktable, the earth had no form to it at all, and it was totally empty of anything that would eventually constitute the planet we know today.  This shapeless mass was completely covered over by water in some way, and the entire thing floated through space in total darkness.

Though the picture I received when first reading this chapter years ago was that the water began as a huge global ocean, if we glance ahead to verses six through eight we get the strong impression that it was more of a thick mist surrounding the entire planet.  We will take a look at those verses in due time; I note it now for a better understanding in this verse.

The first verse introduced the reader to the uni-plural Elohim, and verse two specifically mentions one of God’s Persons, the Holy Spirit.  What His precise purpose in moving across the watery surface of the planet was is unclear here, though as we reach some verses later in this chapter I will mention a definite spiritual parallel that may shed some light on the mystery.

What this verse says is thus laid out quite simply.  But given Christianity’s cowardice in the face of pro-evolution pseudo-scientists, the first two verses of Genesis have received quite tortuous treatment to make them fit in with the big words and fancy talk of the Bible’s secular opponents.

Evolutionists claim that the earth is billions of years old, and are very good at dragging out specific findings that seem to back up their point while hiding or ignoring the tidal wave of contrary evidence.  In presenting their case and talking circles around the atrophied Christianity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientists caused Christians to go hunting for some place in the Bible that could be reinterpreted to allow for an extremely old age of the earth.  They found it between verse one and verse two.

The pieces of the argument go something like this: First, that word “and” at the start of verse two could also be “now” when translated from the Hebrew.  And a “now” implies a “then,” suggesting (but only if you are desperate to appease evolutionists) that God actually made a Creation before Creation.  He whipped out the planet Earth, with plant life and animal life and maybe it was a place where even the angels were visible and walked around and so on.  This “pre-Creation” could have lasted for billions of years.

The pre-Creation then came under God’s judgment for some reason; perhaps the fall of Satan took place during this time, tarnishing the work of God.  In punishment, almost like a frustrated potter mashing his wet clay pot back into a lump and starting over, God took the pre-Creation and wreaked a righteous havoc upon it.  And “now” it became the formless and empty mass of verse two.  Thus Christians could agree with the assertion that certain rocks and fossils were indeed millions of years old without discarding their faith.

The specifics of the hypothesis vary from person to person, but this is the general gist.  Sometimes called the Creation-Reconstruction view, it is more commonly known as the Gap Theory, as it proposes an enormous and unspecified gap of time between the end of verse one and the beginning of verse two.

To further back up this view, its proponents turn to Isaiah 45:18, which reads: “For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the Lord; and there is none else.”

The key phrase in defense of the Gap Theory is that “he created it not in vain.”  The word “vain” here is the Hebrew word for “empty” or “a waste land.”  In a rush to make Creation and evolution compatible, Gap Theorists point to this apparent problem: Genesis says the earth spent some time in an empty state, an unformed wasteland.  But Isaiah says that God did no such thing.

Clearly we misunderstand Genesis 1:2 and it only makes theological sense to assume that God first created a not-so-void planet and then it became void because of judgment and punishment.  Even conservative author William MacDonald advocates a form of this viewpoint in his Believer’s Bible Commentary, as an indicator of how influential this idea has become.

Ignoring the Gap Theory itself for a moment, Isaiah does not contradict a plain understanding of Genesis.  It does not violate Isaiah to say that God brought into existence the raw materials for the universe and then took six days to work that lump into a finished planet.  Yes, He created it “to be inhabited,” so certainly if history ended with verse two, then the Gap Theorists would have an argument because an empty mass of unfinished Creation would be floating around to no good purpose.  (But then neither would the Gap Theorists nor Isaiah ever have existed to argue about it.)

No one walks into a potter’s shop, sees the potter put a glob of clay on the wheel, and accuses him of creating an ugly and useless object.  It is understood that the potter is not done, that he will proceed to mold those materials with care into something beautiful; and thus even that first step is a beautiful one in the hands of a master potter.

Clearly it is one thing to create something and leave it unfinished and useless.  Speaking to this idea, Isaiah points out that the Creation project as a whole was not an empty and vain endeavor.  But it is another thing entirely for the first phase of Creation, the laying out of the raw materials, to be formless and empty temporarily as God works on it.  We do not contradict Isaiah when we apply a simple and literal understanding to verse two.

If someone insists on a planet that is billions of years old, a much easier interpretation would be to assume that once God brought into being the glob of matter that would become planet Earth, He let it sit there for millions of years before moving on to verse three.  But this is still grasping at straws.

In short, the Gap Theory is totally unsubstantiated hypothesis that is not necessary to square the Bible with Science.  Science, or what is really only pseudo-science, is the one that needs to square with the Bible: The Truth need not do any kowtowing to God-hating liars who play sleight-of-hand with the physical evidence in order to con the population into denying Creation.

It’s really very simple: The earth is not billions of years old.  At the furthest possible stretch of interpretation, the Bible presents a planet no older than ten thousand years.  In fact, its age is most likely somewhere between a mere six thousand and seven thousand years.  But the evidence in favor of that reality is certainly not going to be trumpeted by those who do not want to believe in God.  (Nor is it my purpose in these simple devotionals to dive into a lengthy discussion of the evidence, though I may touch on some of it in the future.  Many fine researchers have done a much better job of presenting entire books on the subject.)

I will close today’s thoughts with an interesting prophecy.  Second Peter 3:5 mentions evolutionists before evolutionists ever existed: “For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water.”

Long before Darwin ever existed, long before anyone presumed a Big Bang, long before “scientists” would present the idea that this planet began as a searing-hot fireball, the Holy Spirit enabled Peter to write about these people.  They would deny that the planet was created, and that it was created covered with water; and indeed within the past century they have made that denial loud and clear.

But the glorious Truth is that God created the planet, God owns it, God is in charge, and God has a plan.  As we face a world full of panicked people who have no hope but their own weak attempts at peace and paradise on a crumbling rock, may the knowledge of God as the powerful Creator be an encouragement to us.

An Exploration of Genesis, #1 - Ten Simple Words

Genesis 1:1 – In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The Bible is nothing less than the entire history of mankind told from God’s spiritual perspective.  Other history books focus on the rise and fall of civilizations, countries and their governments, cultural advances, warfare and conquest.  Though the Bible contains some such historical information where relevant, its ultimate focus is God and His workings.

While the sixty-six documents that comprise the Bible may often seem disparate in their subject matter, in reality they all contribute to one big picture.  That picture is of God’s creating a dominion to rule over, Satan’s attempts to usurp God’s authority in that dominion and lead a rebellion, the on-going spiritual war between God’s subjects and Satan’s subjects, God’s final conquering and defeat of all opponents, and God’s handing of the universe over to His Son Jesus Christ as an inheritance.

A look at the organization of the Bible reveals two major sections, the Old Testament and the New Testament.  Without spending pages explaining this, basically the Old Testament is the history of man’s fall away from God, and the New Testament is the record of God’s rescue of man.  This is definitely a layman’s simplification, but my purpose here is simply to introduce the framework of the Bible so that my study in Genesis has a basic context.

The book of Genesis, then, is the beginning of the spiritual history of the universe.  It is the first book of the Old Testament, and the first book of the Pentateuch, a grouping of five books that detail the early history of the Israeli people, the Jews.  The book is assumed to be penned by Moses, though who exactly put the words on parchment can never be proven and ultimately doesn’t matter; the message came from God (II Timothy 3:16) and He has preserved the message through history for us today.  So let’s get into it.

A full and complete understanding of any subject in the Bible would, if pursued as deeply as possible, ultimately come back to the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis; for it is in these ten simple words that the whole of human history and God’s perfect plan find their foundation.  This verse is the cornerstone upon which the whole Bible is built, and all true wisdom and knowledge flows out from the truth presented here.  Or to put it this way: If you want to know the full reason why the thousandth domino fell, your search will eventually bring you back to the very first domino and the entity who pushed it over.

And so begins God’s account of the universe: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”  These words are the overview of everything that follows in the next two chapters; they are to chapter one what a heading is to a body of text.  And they are ten of the most powerful and devastating words in literature, though we will barely skim their surface in this brief devotional.

The first three words establish the inauguration of time as we know it.  Before the beginning there was simply God, who needs no calculation of time because He is outside of it.  Mankind is stuck moving forward with the turning of the planet, the ticking of the clock.  But God is not affected or limited by the forward motion of the time continuum; He created it.

The fourth word, “God,” introduces us to the awesome Creator of the universe.  In the original Hebrew text, this word is “Elohim,” which is a plural noun; so in one sense it would not be incorrect to translate the word as “gods,” which does happen elsewhere in the Old Testament.  But according to Hebrew linguists, its use here is in a decidedly singular structure.  It is a “uni-plural,” hinting at the Trinitarian nature of God that is revealed more fully elsewhere in the Bible.

So a great and mighty uni-plural God initiated the time continuum by doing what?  By creating.  The word here is “bara,” which is only ever used of God’s act of creating.  While we use the English word to say someone “created” a new invention or piece of artwork, no human being could ever hope to “bara” anything.  Only God can truly create, bringing things into existence out of nothing.

And what did He create?  The heaven mentioned here is not the Heaven that is God’s residence mentioned elsewhere.  Instead, it refers to the atmosphere of the planet, and possibly outer space.  Either meaning is an acceptable interpretation, and indeed the Hebrew word may refer simply to all of space, from our atmosphere to the furthest reaches of the universe.  And since it is true that God created both, there is no real argument.

He also created the Earth, all the solid mass that is our planet.  By extension, this verse can refer to all solid matter, the “earth” of other planets as well, since it all came into being by His power.

On one hand, these ten words are indeed simple.  There is no lack of clarity; the facts are laid out without ornamentation.  But the ramifications of these ten words affect everything else in the Bible, indeed everything else we believe.  Though I will not explore the details here, this verse lays the foundation for the Bible’s view of mankind, of the consequences of sin, and even of the purpose for Jesus Christ’s crucifixion.  Ultimately, everything depends on that first domino.

While this verse certainly has a pivotal role in the construction of Christian theology, it is also potent in its destruction of false beliefs.  In his book The Genesis Record, Henry Morris lists seven major schools of thought shot down by the first ten words of the Bible:

Genesis 1:1 refutes atheism, because the universe was created by a God.

It refutes pantheism, for God is transcendent from that which He created.

It refutes polytheism, for one God created all things.

It refutes materialism, for matter had a beginning.

It refutes dualism, because God was alone when He created.

It refutes humanism, because God, not man, is the ultimate reality.

And it refutes evolutionism, because God created all things.

Despite its pivotal role in theology, the Doctrine of Creation is increasingly ignored or even derided by religious institutions for various reasons, including fear of clashing with and being ridiculed by Science.  As the heady intellects of the past two centuries began making evolution sound ever more plausible in scientific terms, unprepared Christians abandoned the belief in a literal Creation in droves.

But even before our so-called enlightened modern era, a literal Creation has rarely been the popular interpretation even within religious circles.  During the Reformation, the Church of England as a body subscribed to the belief that while Creation did happen, the rendering in Genesis should be viewed with some poetic license.  Even many of the translators of the King James Version subscribed to this way of thinking, being devoted Anglicans.

Certainly I do believe that what we read in Genesis should be taken literally.  Given what the Bible says about God’s omnipotence, there is no reason not to assume that these first chapters mean exactly what they say; and the more poetic license one ascribes to these verses the shakier one makes the entire theological structure.

Without the first chapter of Genesis, we would have absolutely no sure way of knowing how the universe began.  Science cannot inform us, though the secular preachers of evolutionary biology and geology are certainly good storytellers, extrapolating billions of years of pre-history out of their biased research into a pathetically small pile of evidence.

But while modern evolutionary thought remains entirely hypothetical because true Science cannot touch the unobserved past, for this same reason it should be noted that Science will never prove Creation either.  Creation, in scientific terms, is a Catastrophic event, not to mention a miraculous one, that was not observed and will not be repeated.  Certainly there is such a preponderance of evidence in favor of Creation that the blindness of evolutionists becomes more laughable the harder they try to deny God and prove the efficacy of real and imagined natural processes, but neither school of thought can ever be solidly established using Science.  And any scientist on either side who claims otherwise has lost sight of the Scientific Method and its limitations.

So it is entirely in keeping with the Bible’s themes to point out that Creation must be taken in faith.  Either believe it or don’t.  There is no proving or disproving it using scientific means.  It was a singular moment in time, a special act of God, and we would know nothing about those first six days if He had not chosen to tell us.

But He did choose to tell us, because it is important to know where we came from, so that we can then learn that we are not now as God would have us to be, so that we can then learn that God has provided a plan to restore that order.  These ten words are a vital beginning if we are to understand the ending.